Last-Studio varia-movies

"Hard to Be a God" ( "Trudno byt bogom", 2013 ) Director: Aleksei German In the distant future, a space traveler from Earth breaks a special law and interferes with the history of another, Medieval-like planet. https://www.imdb.com/title/ _ _ _ Hard to Be a God (Russian: Трудно быть богом, romanized: Trudno byt' bogom) is a 2013 Russian epic medieval science fiction film directed by Aleksei German who co-wrote the screenplay with Svetlana Karmalita. It was his last film and it is based on the 1964 novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. A team of scientists travels from Earth to the planet Arkanar, which is inhabited by a race of humans identical to those of Earth. Their civilization has not progressed beyond a civilization that is culturally and technologically nearly identical to medieval Europe. One reason may be the militantly anti-intellectual attitude of Arkanar: Anyone whom the inhabitants of the planet consider to be an "intellectual" is instantly executed. The Earth scientists are ordered not to interfere and to conceal their identities; but one of them, Rumata, wishes to stop the senseless murders of brilliant minds and is forced at last to pick a side. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God_(2013_film) _ _ _

"Trains of Thoughts" (2012) Director: Timo Novotny An audio-visual essay, which reflects upon & compares metro systems around the world. It is an exploration of a world inside the world as well as feelings, fascination, obsession, fear and themes - of survival, control & silence. For the majority of people, the subway merely represents a reliable means of transportation that quickly and safely transports them to their destination. Timo Novotny’s audio-visual essay, however, reveals that the underground railway is much more. It is quite literally the seedbed of a wide variety of human stories (New York), a centre of diverse musical production (Los Angeles), a favoured locale of suicide and sexual deviance (Tokyo), a glitzy tourist attraction (Moscow), or an ideal place for study or relaxation. Set to the excellent, uninterrupted soundtrack by Sofa Surfers (rightfully dubbed the Austrian Massive Attack), the filmmakers accompany us through the underground railways of several world metropolises, discovering what makes them unique. Sometimes visually reminiscent of a classy music video, this whimsical movie stands out for its original visual treatment and effective interplay of music and image. KVIFF https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1667875/ https://trainsofthoughts.com/ https://dafilms.com/film/10182-trains-of-thoughts https://www.kviff.com/.../film/25/6932-trains-of-thoughts _ _ _ Sofa Surfers - http://www.sofasurfers.info/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofa_Surfers_(band) _ _ _ See less

"Russian Ark" ( "Russkiy Kovcheg", 2002 ) Director: Aleksandr Sokurov A 19th century French aristocrat, notorious for his scathing memoirs about life in Russia, travels through the Russian State Hermitage Museum and encounters historical figures from the last 200+ years. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318034/ _ _ _ Russian Ark (Russian: Русский ковчег, romanized: Russkij kovcheg) is a 2002 experimental historical drama film directed by Alexander Sokurov. The plot follows an unnamed narrator, who wanders through the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, and implies that he died in some horrible accident and is a ghost drifting through. In each room, he encounters various real and fictional people from various periods in the city's 300-year history. He is accompanied by "the European", who represents the Marquis de Custine, a 19th-century French traveler. An international co-production between Russia and Germany, Russian Ark was shot entirely in the Winter Palace of the Russian State Hermitage Museum on 23 December 2001, using a one-take single 87-minute Steadicam sequence shot. It extensively uses the fourth wall device, but repeatedly broken and re-erected. At times, the narrator and the companion interact with the other performers, while at other times they pass unnoticed. The film was entered into the 2002 Cannes Film Festival. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Ark _ _ _ "The Remaining Second World: Sokurov and Russian Ark" Benjamin Halligan March 2003 Film in the Eye of History, Issue 25 https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/film-in-the-eye-of-history/russian_ark/ _ _ _

"Chekhov's Motifs" ( "Chekhovskie motivy", 2002 ) Director: Kira Muratova Kira Muratova's "Checkhovskie motivy", adapted from a couple of works by the famous writer, concerns a man who, in the middle of his wedding, notices that in the audience is his deceased ex-lover. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0321641/ _ _ _ Chekhov's Motifs (Russian: Чеховские мотивы, translit. Chekhovskie motivy, since released in English as Chekhovian Motifs) is a 2002 Russian-Ukrainian comedy film directed by Kira Muratova. It was entered into the 24th Moscow International Film Festival. At the 2002 Russian Guild of Film Critics Awards Kira Muratova received the prize for Best Director. It is based on two works of Anton Chekhov: the short story Difficult People is divided to frame the one act play Tatyana Repina. In the large Shiryaev family, the eldest son, Pyotr, a university student, struggles to free himself from his domineering father. His meek mother tries to shield him, while his 13-year-old sister Varvara remains indifferent to the family's conflicts. As Pyotr leaves home to head to the city for his studies, he unexpectedly finds himself at a rural church where a wedding of visiting bohemians is taking place. During the lengthy church service, the guests, restless and bored, are suddenly distracted by a peculiar sight: a woman cloaked in black, moaning softly, appears within the church. Some guests, followed by the groom himself, begin to believe she is the ghost of his former lover, who had taken her own life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chekhov%27s_Motifs _ _ _ "Chekhovian Motifs" As any other review will also tell you, the film is called Chekhovian Motifs because it is based on two of Anton Chekhov’s lesser-known texts, the short story “Difficult People” and the parody play Tat’iana Repina. The two proto-plots are attached to each other by means of a character from the first one, a young man (Filipp Panov) who gets involved in a row with his father over money, leaves the house, and meets, on his way to a station, a guest hurrying to the wedding from Tat’iana Repina. About 40 per cent of the screen time is then given to a “life-size” (and seemingly larger-than-life) reproduction of an Orthodox wedding ritual, interlaced, just as in Chekhov’s joke of a play, with inappropriately random conversations of the guests. That the film bears neither one of the titles nor a combination of them, academic paper-style (The Mystery of Tat’iana Repina: Difficult and Dead People in Chekhov, perhaps?) can be explained by the fact that Muratova and her writing partner and husband, Evgenii Golubenko, added things here and there to the point where the director herself could not remember where Chekhov’s texts ended and their script began. In preparation for the project, moreover, Muratova read more than just the two works by Chekhov, so it would indeed be fair to say that there is some extract of Chekhov’s characters, themes, or motifs present in the film. If one links the term “motif” back to music, it is easy to see Kira Muratova’s film as a “variations on a theme,” a musical development of one or two basic melodies, taking them through various repetitions and permutations. Muratova’s long-standing position as an auteur undoubtedly justified this reading in the eyes of many critics and festival audiences. Some even said that Muratova’s film related to nothing but Muratova, and Chekhov was only a pretext. It is easy, however, to attribute a number of elements or “motifs” in the film to Chekhov. In the formulaic and textbook-based tradition of Russian school curriculum and popular culture, classical writers for more than a century have been distilled into a handful of useful slogans. Pushkin is quite simply “our everything”; Gogol’ is “a rare bird that flies to the middle of the Dnieper”; Dostoevskii – “am I a trembling creature or do I have the right?;” Lev Tolstoi is “Count Andrei’s oak tree;” and Chekhov is “squeezing the slave out of you drop by drop.” In fact, perhaps due to his supreme mastery as a short story writer, a number of Chekhov’s turns of phrase and stock tricks have entered the common repository of knowledge. Almost anyone would be able to say that Chekhov is about tragedies that happen while people are simply having tea; he is about the slow death of the noble class and the intellectual bankruptcy of the intelligentsia; he’s about suicides that happen off-stage; he is all about rifles that hang on wall and absolutely have to go off in the last act. This last was actually advice given to the writer by Nemirovich-Danchenko, but it is emblematic of Chekhov’s position in contemporary culture: it does not matter anymore if these “motifs” are facts or myths. If the rifle is missing in Chekhovian Motifs, at least the intelligentsia is most definitely still there; and it still struggles. In fact, with the appearance of Aleksandr Bashirov at the very beginning of the film, we are firmly in a Chekhovian world of nonsense, down the rabbit hole of provincial Russia. Its topoi remain the same: a yard, a dining room, a road, a church. It is even black-and-white, like something that Chekhov himself might have seen on the screen. It is hard to say what the black-and-white aesthetics of the film serves exactly. In its second half, of course, it turns the bride (Natal’ia Buz’ko) into a silent melodrama heroine, with her heavily made up eyes and a pout reminiscent of the two Veras: Karalli and Kholodnaia. The action loses a time stamp, a direct connection to any time, as words from the late 19th century clash with cars and clothes from the late 20th century. It presents a slice of time (especially in the wedding scene), and a unique take on the concept of “mummified time,” perhaps even a reflection on cinema and its history. There is also a sense of her own, “Muratovian,” motifs repeated, perhaps due to her trademark combination of established actors, typages, and former members of a farce TV program Maski Show, which was known for its slapstick and utterly silent lowbrow comedy, thus contributing to the dislocated silent cinema effect. Chekhovian Motifs is a silent film that struggles to speak. It is possible that the decision to shoot the film in black-and-white is directly related to the fact that Muratova strips the dialogue down to the language of children. They slowly acquire speech by mindlessly repeating the outer form of words and phrases used in their hearing—“It’s a barn! It’s a shop! It’s a barn! It’s a shop!” or “Porridge, porridge, television, porridge, porridge. Baits, baits, porridge, porridge, television…”—are equally valuable to their interactions with the world even if they are equally meaningless to grown-ups. Meanwhile, Muratova’s grown-up characters also have difficulty expressing their emotions and thoughts, especially in the heat of the moment (and there are many such moments). They talk incessantly about being silent; they beseech their interlocutors to listen to them but don’t say anything beyond the repetition of this appeal. The dialogue is a hay-stack of unrelated words that might contain a needle of meaning. Chekhov himself was attuned to the discrepancy between sincere feelings and stilted words: his three sisters repeat “To Moscow! To Moscow!” until the words lose their meaning completely. The “much-esteemed bookcase” of The Cherry Orchard, the “people, lions, eagles, and partridges” of The Seagull, not to mention snippets of songs and billiards terminology used as fillers are also “Chekhovian motifs.” “Murderous repetition” (Jose Alaniz) is not only Muratova’s trademark, it is Chekhov’s as well. The difference is only in degree. Chekhov’s theater is more than anything else the comedy of repetitions. In Muratova, the verbal repetitions rise to the level of trans-sense poetry, together with pauses that provide counterpoint to the sound fragments and add to the feeling of a mad silent movie that suddenly burst into speech. In a way, Woody Allen in his mishmash parody of Russian literary classics, Love and Death (1975), comes surprisingly close to this Chekhovian combination of the outrageously absurd, the poignantly ironic, and the underlying sense of resignation, evident in Muratova’s film as well. Some critics maintained that the dominant mood of Chekhov that Muratova had been able to reproduce in the film was his sense of being tired of people. However, Chekhov himself famously insisted that his Cherry Orchard, despite all the heartbreak and melodrama on and off the stage, was in fact a comedy and had to be performed as such. And, just like Chekhov, Muratova asserts that if not all then many of her films contain elements of comedy, with Chekhovian Motifs being essentially a dramedy. Natalie Ryabchikova https://neweastcinema.pitt.edu/2017/04/17/ch/ _ _ _

"Second Class Citizens" ( "Vtorostepennye lyudi", 2001 ) Director: Kira Muratova https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0281357/ _ _ _

Nagisa Oshima - Gohatto, 1999 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213682/ _ _ _ Karl-Kristjan Nagel - https://nagelid.ee/ http://erztria.blogspot.com/ _ _ _

Nagisa Oshima - Gohatto - ending, 1999 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0213682/ _ _ _ Karl-Kristjan Nagel - https://nagelid.ee/ http://erztria.blogspot.com/ _ _ _

"Three Stories" ( "Tri istorii", 1997 ) Director: Kira Muratova A man goes to see his former schoolmate working at a boiler house and persuades him to burn in the furnace the corpse of his communal flat neighbor whom he has just murdered after a quarrel. An orphaned girl gets a job in the archives of the maternity home to find out the identity of her mother who abandoned her years earlier. She finds her, befriends her and takes the first opportunity to throw her into the sea. An old intellectual tries to explain to the neighbor's five-year-old daughter "all the abomination of her lumpen existence". The girl feeling hurt for her mother decides to poison the old man with arsenic.—NTV-PROFIT <[email protected]> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120372/ _ _ _ Three Stories (Russian: Три истории, romanized: Tri istorii) is a 1997 Russian-Ukrainian crime comedy film directed by Kira Muratova. It was entered into the 47th Berlin International Film Festival. The picture won the Special Jury Prize at Kinotavr. The film is dedicated to the memory of Sergei Apollinarievich Gerasimov. Among seven other films by Muratova, it is included in the list of List of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema. The film is an anthology film, featuring three different stories. In Boiler Room No. 6, two friends converse in a boiler room. One of them keeps complaining about an unbearable neighbor who is stalking him both at home and at work. What he is not mentioning in the conversation is that he has already killed her and hidden her body. Ophelia focuses on a misanthropic hospital archivist, who is particularly resentful of mothers who abandon their children. So, she proceeds to murder one these uncaring mothers. In A Girl and Death, an old man reluctantly befriends a little girl from his neighborhood, though she irritates him. The girl poisons his water, with the expectation that she and her mother will take over his room after his death. The film consists of three novellas the plot of which is based on criminal stories that do not have usual logical motives. The people who become killers in all these episodes are the ones who at first glance seem to be completely incapable of murder. The First Story "Boiler Room No. 6" A modest employee brings a cupboard to the boiler room for his friend, Tikhomirov. He works as a stoker, writes poetry in his spare time and rents out a place for intimate pleasure to local homosexuals. During a normal conversation between old acquaintances, Tikhomirov time after time returns to the story of his unbearable neighbor who does not let him live in peace and even comes to his workplace in order to compromise him... Tikhomirov gets interrupted and is not able to get to the point of his request by frequenters of the depraved corner, who by the way also see him as an object for pleasure and even offer money to him... In the closet lies the naked corpse of Tikhomirov's neighbor (she walked around the house like this), which he intends to burn in the boiler room. The Second Story "Ophelia" Ofa works in a hospital archive. She does not like men, women, or children: "I would rate this planet as zero." Her attention is especially directed towards those mothers who abandon their children in a maternity hospital. A gynecologist makes advances towards Ofa, whom she uses for an alibi at the moment she commits the murder of a disowning mother. Her literary ideal is Shakespeare's Ophelia, whose fate Ofa arranges for a single woman – her own mother, Alexandra Ivanovna Ivanova, who many years ago gave her up. The Third Story "A Girl and Death" An elderly man in a wheelchair operates a coffee grinder. A little girl who lives nearby plays with him, irritating and annoying the old man from time to time. From the mouth of the baby resonates the neighbor's expectation, that after his death she together with her mother will get his room. The old man teaches the girl how to play chess, reads a book to her, and she in turn brings a glass of water containing rat poison. After drinking a cup of water, the old man dies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Stories_(1997_film) _ _ _ Ukrainian filmmaker Kira Muratova offers a darkly comical look at everyday cruelty in these three savage tales. The first, “Boiler Room No. 6” is based on a story by Yevgeny Golubenko and takes place with in a blue-tinted boiler room where a panic-stricken resident of a communal apartment has dragged the body of his neighbor, a young woman he killed over an argument about a bar of soap. The nearly surreal “Ophelia,” the second story, centers on the vengeance of the title woman, a blonde beauty who works in a maternity hospital. The third vignette, “The Maiden and Death” follows a winsome little girl who tires of being constantly admonished by her well-meaning, but wearisome, paralyzed grandfather. https://rarefilmm.com/2018/06/tri-istorii-1997/ _ _ _

"Passions" ( "Uvlecheniya", 1994 ) Director: Kira Muratova A jockey and a circus performer meet in a hospital, and then we see not so much a consistent plot but a mosaic of human passions. The true nature of passion itself revealed in this bright and beautiful movie. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111583/ _ _ _ Passions, whose title (Russian: Увлеченья, romanized: Uvlechenya) can also be translated "Enthusiasms," is a 1994 drama by Ukrainian director Kira Muratova based on the novellas of Boris Dedyukhin. It was screened at the Locarno Festival in 1994. It received two Nika Awards, for Best Picture and Best Director (Muratova). The picture also won the Special Jury Prize of the Kinotavr film festival. The film's story unfolds in a small town on the beach. Two females: a blonde - Lilia and a brunette - Violetta, are fond of horse racing and the jockeys are fond of the women. Star jockey Oleg Nikolaev teaches Violetta horse riding and another horseman who is also interested in the same girl, summons Oleg Nikolayev to a duel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passions_(1994_film) _ _ _ "Passions" Passions is considered Muratova’s most unusual film, the one which, at least on the surface, seems to have the least to do with her considerable body of work; paradoxically, it was one of her most popular films in Russia, even winning the Nika (Russia's Oscar equivalent) for the Best Film of 1994. Circus performer Violetta is introduced to Sasha, a jockey who has been hospitalized after a bad fall. She's attracted to him, and even more to his circle of friends, becoming fascinated with their devotion to horses and the lore of horseracing. She decides to go visit her new friends on a stud farm in Central Asia; ostensibly for the purpose of finding a partner for a new horse act she hopes to bring to the circus, but perhaps more honestly just to learn more about them and their world. Laced with a slightly surreal quality, Passions is an effective and perceptive portrait of a kind of subculture, a world that seems to co-exist alongside everyday reality and to blend with it on occasion. Muratova has spoken about how much she enjoyed the chance to work extensively with animals - seemingly one of her own great passions- in the film. https://www.peramuseum.org/Film/Passions/865/153 _ _ _ "PASSIONS" “The unconventional, personal and arty film is not for everyone.” Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz The strange plot-less post-Soviet film by Ukrainian indie filmmaker Kira Muratova(“The Tuner”/”Chekhov’s Motives“/”Second Class Citizens“), once known as the cinema bad girl in the USSR, now allowed to do her madcap irritating surrealist thing of making films by breaking the rules of logic without interference, is a film that I’m willing to wager will turn off more Americans than turn on. It won a Nika in Russia for Best Film. The photography is delicious, the many references to literature are tantalizing and the pic bizarrely raises oddball questions about the love for horses in comparison to the foolish love of sportsmen for pretty young women. One of its many bold statements that challenges the conventional wisdom of the day and defies the viewer to accept it on its own terms is when it bellows out its theme that “Beauty always strives for self-destruction.” Passions is set at a seaside hospital and at a lush horse farm among a bunch of chatty Fellini-like character onlookers, who are intensely engaged throughout in a gabfest about such things as beauty, horses, the circus, centaurs and love. An often repeated question, one that’s never answered, is raised among the sporting experts about “Who wins the race, the jockey or the horse?” The flighty blonde nurse Lila (Renata Litvinova) attends a wounded jockey and calls herself “A flower above and below water.” The brunette Violetta (Svetlana Kolenda) is a vain circus performer, who can’t fully accept being told over and over by jockeys and trainers that “the circus horse is inferior to the thoroughbred” and that “Dogs are prose and horses are poetry.” The unconventional, personal and arty film is not for everyone, as Muratova’s artful way of showing love to the horses and getting at the intrigues found in horse racing demand that the viewer bet everything on her opinions winning the wager. It’s likable for the rich racing atmosphere created and the feeling that all its silly idiosyncratic touches might actually lead to something rewarding if pondered in a serious way. https://dennisschwartzreviews.com/passions/ _ _ _ "Passions" (Kira Muratova, Russia, 1994) How Strange the Change (from Major to Minor) If you want to know the truth, here it is. If you want me to invent something more complicated, I can try. – Kira Muratova, 2002 (1) In English, the Russian title Uvlecheniya comes out three ways: as Passions (which sounds melodramatic and grand, which the film is not), Petty Passions (which sounds moralistic, which the film is not), and, most charmingly and matter-of-factly, Enthusiasms (which, unfortunately, will never fly as an English-language movie title). Maybe Pretty Passions might do the trick, especially as it echoes the 1960s pre-Badlands story of mad criminal love Pretty Poison – and that could be the proper title of many Muratova films. Pretty Passion as an antidote to Pretty Poison; the positive side or shadow of the negative. Aha, a hook! – but a deceptive one. Surveyors of Kira Muratova’s career tend to stumble over this one as a lightweight interlude, a “superficial” film in her career, reflecting some fleeting post-Glasnost of sustained cheer in Muratova’s (at the time) 60-year-old bosom, and unpredictably a relatively popular success; she herself, in her usual irritable and paradoxical way, countered that it was “deeply superficial”. And we must follow her exasperated, liberating lead. The seductive, critical game of extreme points, of dialectics, of binary oppositions does not get us terribly far into Muratova. Commentators try in vain to divide her films into opposing groups, like: the plotless and the plotted; or the colour works and the black-and-white ones. As if this categorising gesture could somehow impose order on these films in their wild variety, from one to the next and within each one! What is the plot of Passions? Neither plot nor theme swim into view within the first thirty minutes (which is the section I will concentrate on here). We dance – sometimes literally – from one point of interest to another, one enthusiasm to another. But always on a hinge, an overlap: it’s a cleaner, more minimal version of the chaos we see in Robert Altman or Emir Kusturica. But hardly a more logical method. “Free association” comes to mind as a way to label her creative process, except that this free association (as free association is wont to do) comes complete with mind-bending repetitions, loops and metamorphoses. The words go around and around (a little in the way Pascal Bonitzer writes dialogues for Chantal Akerman or Raúl Ruiz); the gestures, too … Like Boris Barnet the Master, Muratova is the Mistress of the endlessly renewed, endlessly circulated, endlessly reinvented gesture. As in a Chinese film of strenuously magic realism, The Sun Also Rises (Wen Jiang, 2007) – containing the apotheosis of another woman director-actor, Joan Chen, fifteen years after her iconic transformation in Lynch’s Twin Peaks – this means that Muratova is especially fond of pouty doll-women, impossibly beautiful marionettes (like Svetlana Kolenda and Renata Litvinova here), themselves miraculously hinged at every part of their body, twisting and turning and thrusting and dividing at the knees, waist, wrists, neck … The chaos of Passions, knowingly or not, evokes Federico Fellini. But Fellini without a centre: without “the crisis of the artist” or “the loss of time, history and memory” or “the world as it changes from one era to another”. All enthusiasms in Muratova are small, minute, obsessive – even microscopic. They spin their web wonderfully, but don’t take up so much space. This is why she uses the hinge-overlap method: it’s a lapidary style, the webs join up and combine, extending in every direction. Every which way and loose. Manny Farber used to slyly scoff at people who claimed to know what a film is about. Plot and theme are the two standard ways we corral the energy or ecology or wildness of a film – in the former, banally (“the film is about a horse-enthusiast colony”), in the second, either banally or ingeniously (“the film is about the life-force’s resistance in an oppressive social framework”). Filmmakers sometimes prefer to speak of the subject of a particular work, which is neither plot nor theme, exactly, but something more material and physical, something that can be dug into and explored: for Robert Bresson, the subject of Pickpocket is pickpocketing, which gives him a milieu to study and depict, an action to render (in all its movements and varieties), and some kind of mysterious passage to traverse (from the street to the prison cell, via the racetrack, the train station … ), the meaning of which is, ultimately, secretive and personal, rather than communicative in a town-hall “storytelling” way. With Muratova, even the subject is obscure. That is why her commentators seize on what recurs (from film to film and within each film), on what fitfully coheres the elements that spin off from an evaporated centre: murder, depression, animals, children, sudden recitals of song of dance … But you know that Muratova has gotten right under the skin of her commentators, sending them mad, when they find themselves writing very truthful, free-associative things like: “Surface, paper, and the fictional self emerge as the organising principles of this film” (that’s Nancy Condee on The Tuner [2004]). (2) It is a contagion we critics must strive to emulate. Passions proceeds through endless hair-splitting, impossible comparisons, expounded upon in the sing-song dialogue and enacted in the choreography of gesticulating and extravagantly (often idiotically) costumed bodies. And never a comparison between just two entities, but (thanks to the hinge method) at least three, and usually many more: in the initial dances through a little wood and over to a humble stretch of beach (with some possibly medical institution vaguely glimpsed but never entirely identified in the background), the skills of horse-riding are combatively compared to the acrobatic skills of the circus big-top; but then one or other or both are compared (via the introduction of doll-woman number 2, the Nurse-actress), as a method of healing, with health-care or psychiatry or medicine. A little later, in the course of a wonderfully crammed lateral tracking shot following a gaggle of people, the concept of “pace” is endlessly posed as a question, receiving various theoretical and physical accounts: it’s a relative concept, it seems, a concept of relativity indeed, since it can only be gauged by the rider in flight, and yet that flight can so easily be interrupted or distracted. It’s clearly a model of the kind of movement in Muratova’s work itself. We never can know the poles or points of Self and Other in Muratova, because they shift and change before our eyes – usually thanks to her other favourite device, the “reveal” of a part of space or a figure/object in space we have not previously viewed before the mid-scene pan or cut. In the second tableau-in-motion of Passions, set at the mysterious horse colony (are these horses being trained, collected, exhibited?), we are introduced to a slightly creepy, neurotic photographer (but then, all microscopic enthusiasms in Muratova are necessarily neurotic, it’s her and their “aesthetic syndrome”): it seems as if the doll-women are lining up, posing, to be shot by him, but by steps they pass out of his camera range – really, it’s the horses (or one special, especially glamorous and luminous horse) he wants to capture. So we pass to the horse, to its magnificent visage. And now we seem to pass into this horse’s POV (why not? Bresson did it in Balthazar), watching a woman beginning to strip for him (the “him” is an associative hypothesis here). But the longer the shot remains in place, the less the POV seems stable or constant: the point of interest, as ever, is shifting, turning away, transforming – and thus so are all the point-to-point (human to human, human to animal, child to adult) relations forever set-up, taken apart and reconstituted. The mood-changes are just as constant, and just as sudden: from light to dark, gaiety to sadness, major to minor. Who could possibly reconstruct a hierarchy of values from such a perplexing set of shifts and reversals? To an interviewer’s question about Chekhovian Motifs (2002) – “The film seems very poetic. How would you characterise its atmosphere?” – Muratova proudly and pre-emptively replies: “Your question is absolutely incorrect and illegitimate”, bothering to add: “I had no intention to convey any mood by means of my film ... I can’t define verbally the thing you call atmosphere. It would be too simple.” Intentions, definitions, schemas belong to critics and analysts; the work itself is an organic process of “separated parts” that “melt into something living”. (3) Muratova follows her enthusiasms. (Her motto: “What is most important is to please myself” – not any imaginary collective audience or constituency.) It is strictly impossible to know, at any given point, what shape or significance they are going to take. They are all in flight, and the path of that flight can go literally anywhere. Of course, she loves all that is theatrical, artificial, histrionic. Her cinema is the cinema of everything you can see, every ball that can be suspended in the air and passed on to the next player (or clown). Nothing hidden from view – except the underlying logic, the generating principle or matrix of the work (or her whole work). Like the manifestation of a dream or fantasy or reverie, all in a rush, no self-questioning or ‘secondary revision’ (Freud’s term). Acting out, as the pop psychologists of American film and TV say. Kira Muratova acting out and – through her – private life, public life … plus film itself, in all its infinitely divisible, endlessly traceable, states and moods. NOTES 1. Dmitry Desyaterik, “Kira Muratova: ‘What is Most Important to Me is to Please Myself’”, Russian Journal (11 September 2002); no longer online. 2. Nancy Condee, “Muratova’s Well-Tempered Scam", KinoKultura, no. 7 (January 2005), https://www.kinokultura.com/reviews/R1-05tuner.html 3. Desyaterik, Muratova interview. © Adrian Martin 13 September 2008 https://adrianmartinfilmcritic.com/reviews/p/passions.html _ _ _

"Lisbon Story" ( 1994 ) Director: Wim Wenders The director Friedrich Monroe has trouble with finishing a silent b&w movie about Lisbon. He calls his friend, the sound engineer Phillip Winter, for help. As Winter arrives Lisbon weeks later, Monroe is disappeared but has left the unfinished film. Winter decides to stay, because he is fascinated of the city and the Portuguese singer Teresa, and he starts to record the sound of the film. At the same time Monroe cruises through the city with a camcorder and tries to catch unseen pictures. Later they meet and Winter convinces Monroe of finishing the film.—Christoph Blendinger <[email protected]> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110361/ _ _ _ Lisbon Story (Portuguese: O Céu de Lisboa (Brasil); German: Lisbon Story) is a 1994 feature film directed by Wim Wenders. It was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival. As part of Lisbon's programme as the European City of Culture in 1994, Wenders and three Portuguese filmmakers were invited to make a documentary about the city. The result was the fictional Lisbon Story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_Story_(1994_film) _ _ _